Here the story pauses. There is no new story in this chapter. Instead we look at the book that has been handing us the ones we have read.
There is one question. The person who passed twenty-three stories to us, what was he choosing by?
The Title Already Says It
The yusa in Samguk Yusa means what was left out.
Left out of what? Goryeo already had an official history made by the state. It is called Samguk Sagi, and it came out about a hundred and thirty years earlier.
So this book was written with another book beside it from the start.
It is not a book that sets out to write again what the official history wrote. It is a book that gathers what the official history did not. The title says that first.
Where they were made differs too.
One was made by a state that assembled men for the task; the other was gathered by one monk in a temple. The rule for deciding what to keep could not possibly be the same.
He Did Not Delete What Could Not Be Verified
Reading this book, one thing snags immediately.
A child comes out of an egg, six come down from the sky, and blood white as milk rises where a head was cut off. There is no way to verify any of it.
Iryeon did not delete it.
Things a compiler of official history would have cut, he kept. Dangun in the first chapter is the clearest case. The official history left that ground empty and this book put it at the very front.
Think about what deleting would mean and the choice comes into view.
Cut everything that cannot be verified and what the people of that age lived by disappears with it. Events remain and what people thought does not.
The side Iryeon chose was to keep.
Where He Steps Back and Where He Steps Forward
That does not mean he asserts things as fact.
In the body of the entries he mostly stands one step back. The record says so. It is said to be thus. Others tell it differently. Phrases like these are in every entry.
He writes even a name that way.
Of Mukhoja he notes that the word is taken as meaning the dark-faced man rather than as a name. That Morye is also written Morok is set down beside it.
Not ruling, and leaving the split where it is, is his ordinary posture.
Then there is the place where he comes forward.
It is the four lines at the end of an entry. We have seen them six times. Three of those: at the end of the white blood he said what had moved him. At Hwangnyongsa he said the bond runs deepest in this land. At the nine-storey pagoda he sang a pagoda that had already burned with the eye of the years it stood.
This is why it is Iryeon who asks back, and not the book.
The book stands back and the man steps out in four lines.
The Losing Side and the Nameless Side
Look at what is in it and the choosing hand shows more clearly.
Usually only the winning country’s record survives, and this book has things that are not that. Gaya was absorbed into Silla, and Kim Suro and Heo Hwangok run across two chapters here.
Baekje comes up more than once.
Seodong was a young man from Baekje, and the man who built the largest thing Silla ever raised was a Baekje craftsman. The story of a country going under is not left out either.
People who left no name are unusually many.
The three companions who followed Jumong and Morye who dug a room out of the ground are among them. So are the unnamed monk who kept Daeseungsa and the hand that carved ten thousand buddhas. The record writes what they did and not who they were.
None of this has a place in a state history.
An official history records the country’s business, and there is no column in it for one cave room and one craftsman. That they are in this book is itself a statement of what this book is.
When This Book Was Made
One more thing has to be taken in.
Iryeon gathered this book not while Silla flourished but after Goryeo had been through the Mongol invasions.
We have already seen it in the pagoda chapter.
That pagoda burned in the winter the Mongol soldiers came. And Iryeon measured out in feet the height of a pagoda that no longer existed. He wrote down the names that had been on its nine storeys without missing one.
It is worth asking what it is to record an absent thing that thoroughly.
It is closer to holding on than to recording. Read the whole book as written by that kind of hand and a good many places read differently.
Today, What the Official History Left Out
So the question remains whether this can be called history.
From one side it is hard to. What was verified and what was passed along sit in one bowl, and the reader does the sorting alone every time.
From the other side this is history too.
That people believed it is also something that happened. Delete belief and keep only events, and the age is left at half.
This series does not pick one of the two.
One thing can be said plainly, though. What is in this book did not survive by itself; somebody chose it. Because there was a chooser, we know Dangun and Cheoyong and Ichadon.
There is always somebody deciding what goes in and what stays out.
The same holds for what we see today. Between the photographs that survive and the ones that do not, a hand has passed once.
Seeing that hand is what this chapter set out to do.
Not the End Yet
Part three closes here. A new idea came in, temples and pagodas went up, and we have followed how people took it.
Part four is next. The people who actually lived the idea come in. Wonhyo, who turned back on the road to study abroad, and Uisang, who went all the way. There is a monk nobody could recognise because he did not look like much.
And in the last chapter we look at the whole book once more. What is asked then is not what Iryeon chose, but what we have inherited.